Category Archives: Poverty

GOP’s Age Warfare.

Posted on by

Teapublicans always whine about what they refer to as “class warfare” whenever anyone wants to level the playing field between the wealthy and the middle class. But now they are waging a war on those 50 and older by trying to privatize Social Security and Medicare. To push their agenda of destroying “entitlements,” the Tea Party says these safety net programs are unfair to millennials who have to contribute to the programs.

Would the millennials rather contribute to their parents when the safety nets fail?

Would they rather take in their elderly parents and grandparents? Would they prefer to offer them transportation, feed them, clothe them, provide elder care, track their meds, and bathe them? Would they like to cover their health care costs?

There’s a reason that most civilized nations have safety nets, such as Social Security and Medicare. It’s because most compassionate people would rather not see the elderly broke, hungry, sick and homeless. The large corporate masters of the Republican Party and its Tea Party parasites, on the other hand, only care about their bottom lines. If increasing profits hurts some people, so what? Their overpaid and overstuffed executives won’t have to worry about retirement, and neither will their parents. In most cases, they can simply send a check to help out poor ol’ Mom and Dad.

Has it really come to this? Is the new GOP strategy to pit one generation against another? Has the GOP tired of taking money from the working poor and food stamps from children? Are the elderly the last people standing between them and the tax-free government they desire?

These words may seem cynical. But that’s far better than the cynical actions of today’s GOP.

Another Debt Ceiling Debacle?

Posted on by

Teapublicans are always fond of relating government budgets to your household budget. It’s a lousy analogy. But let’s use it for the purposes of the debt ceiling debate.

Imagine if your family, concerned about its spending and debt, had a meeting and decided that you no longer wanted to pay any debts above…let’s say, $10,000.  And let’s say that your family couldn’t agree on spending cuts. For example, the father just doesn’t want to stop collecting expensive guns and driving luxury cars, the mother doesn’t want to give up health insurance and the 401K, and the kids don’t want to give up school and food.  So your family agrees to stop paying the mortgage, the utilities and the credit card companies.

What do you think would happen?

The mortgage company would foreclose on your home, the utilities would cut off electricity, water and gas, and the credit card companies would cut off any new purchases in addition to adding large penalties and interest to your outstanding balance.  Moreover, your family would be unable to borrow money from anyone else. And, if someone else was willing to risk loaning your family money, it would be at exhorbitant interest rates.

Does that sound like something you want to intentionally do to your family? No? Then why would you want to do that to your country?

What we have is a Republican Party that doesn’t want to give up the world’s most lavish military budget or tax cuts and welfare for our largest corporations. The Democratic Party doesn’t want to give up Social Security, Medicare, and access to health care and food stamps for the working poor. And the Tea Party parasites don’t want to spend anything because they don’t like the government anyway.

During the 2012 presidential election, we had a national debate about the direction of our nation and its budget. On these issues, the voters overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party.  The results of that election should direct the conversation about government spending. Most important, there should be a conversation with all parties sitting down together and having an adult conversation about our nation’s future.

Unfortunately, the Tea Party parasites don’t want to do that, and the gutless Republican leaders are kowtowing to them.

Beware The Pendulum.

Posted on by

As a creative director for ad agencies and as a part-time college instructor, I used to teach that social trends and fashions responded like a pendulum with a 360-degree axis. The pendulum freely swings, but never back to exactly the same place twice.

I was reminded of that description while watching the ceremonies marking the 50-year anniversary of the March on Washington. In 1963, the US seemed hopelessly racist. In the Jim Crow South, blacks were segregated from whites. African-Americans were denied the right to vote. Peaceful civil rights demonstrators were met with fire hoses, police dogs, beatings and murder.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 began to change that.

In the last two presidential elections, African-Americans voted in record numbers helping to elect the first US president of African-American heritage. (I’ve always marveled that his Irish-American heritage is seldom mentioned because of the color of his skin.)

Obviously, the pendulum has swung a long way from 1963. But it seems to be swinging back.

Since the election of President Obama, numerous states in both the North and the South have passed restrictive voting laws to make it more difficult for minorities to vote. No other US president has been subjected to such angry derision. No other president has been repeatedly asked to show his papers to prove that he is a citizen. No other president has been interrupted during a State of the Union speech by a “Congressman” calling him a liar. No other president has been met by such congressional obstruction.

Racism did not disappear in the sixties. It is just more subtle. There are fewer racist killings, beatings and other hate crimes. Today, the racism is economic and institutionalized. Unemployment for African-Americans is roughly double that for whites. Many of those who do have jobs are not paid a living wage. Schools in African-American communities are grossly underfunded compared to those in white communities. African-Americans are not only three times more likely to be arrested as whites, they receive longer sentences for similar crimes.

Indeed, young African-American and Latino males are seen as a source of profit for the private prison industry. They are also disproportionately represented in our military and asked to fight wars to protect the economic interests of large corporations that are almost exclusively owned and managed by wealthy white Americans.

News organizations, once again, insert race into stories of crime. Media commentators feel comfortable talking about the disintegration of African-American families while ignoring the disintegration of white families. When minorities bring up discrimination and other issues of race, white political pundits refer to it as “playing the race card.” They would like us to believe that racism no longer exists. (Of course, it doesn’t for them.)

Most disturbing is the fact that the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court has voted to weaken the Voting Rights Act and to undermine affirmative action.

On the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have A Dream” speech, we should all take a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come. But only a moment. It’s time to get back to work to make sure the pendulum swings in the right direction again.

Detroit Is Merely The Canary In The Coal Mine.

Posted on by

It’s popular for conservatives to blame the bankruptcy of the City of Detroit on a history of Democratic leadership. Indeed, the conservative commentators seem to revel in the city’s troubles. And since Detroit has a high percentage of African-Americans, the problems also conveniently fit their racist narrative.

The wingnuts believe that this simply couldn’t happen to a government run by white conservatives.

Hmmm…What about California? Following a government led by Ronald Reagan and, more recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state was teetering on the abyss. But after a return to Democratic leadership, California is regaining economic health and running surpluses. The same can be said for Minnesota.

Detroit’s problems aren’t merely the fault of city leadership. The state of Michigan has failed to deliver the aid it promised. But the real problems are the result of national and international politics. As part of globalization, greedy corporations shipped Detroit’s manufacturing jobs out of state and out of country in order to avoid paying for employee health care and pensions. In addition, many of the city’s mostly white executives fled to the suburbs leaving the poor and the unemployed to pick up the tab for their excesses.

Given the many factors contributing to the city’s financial problems, it would have been virtually impossible for Detroit to overcome them by itself. Detroit didn’t create the problems on its own. It shouldn’t have to face them alone.

Moreover, Detroit may be just the first large city to declare bankruptcy. Other cities that were once home to large manufacturing plants are facing many of the same difficulties. And, depending on what happens in Detroit, they may follow its lead.

Sadly, the situation in Detroit reminds me of the aftermath of natural disasters. When the Midwest was devastated in the nineties by floods, many on the East Coast objected to paying for disaster relief. Many across the nation objected to paying to help New York City after 9/11. Many objected to the cost of rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina. And congressional representatives and senators from other states voted against funding to New Jersey and New York to pay for relief from Hurricane Sandy.

Far too many Americans lack compassion for their fellow Americans. Instead of looking for ways to help, they are more intent on affixing blame. They assume that they are so smart that such a disaster could never happen to them. Invariably, they are wrong.

How Would You Pay For Uninsured Healthcare?

Posted on by

Conservatives in Arizona and other states are mouth-frothing mad over the expansion of Medicaid for those who can’t afford health insurance. They claim that it’s a matter of personal responsibility; that the current system is fine; that people should simply go without healthcare if they can’t afford it.

Hmmm…

The people saying that consist mostly of the Bible-thumping, church-going crowd. You know, the good “Christians” who claim to follow the guy who once said something like, “What you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.”

What these people don’t understand, in addition to the Bible they claim to study, is that even people without money deserve healthcare. In fact, our federal government came to that realization years ago. That’s why hospitals are mandated to treat those in need, even if they can’t afford to pay for the treatment. As a result, most of the working poor (people below or near the poverty line are already eligible for Medicaid) delay medical care as long as possible. When their conditions have reached a point where they are more difficult to treat, they go to the Emergency Room where treatment costs many times more than care at a doctor’s office.

Who pays for their treatment? The very people who are whining and bitching about expanding Medicaid to cover more of the working poor. As a result, the whiners pay considerably more than they would if everyone had health insurance…even government-paid health insurance.

So the question is this: How would you like to pay for your brothers’ and sisters’ healthcare? Through the efficiently-run Medicaid system? Or through the many times more expensive E.R.?

Families In Deep Doo-Doo.

Posted on by

It seems that nearly every week, a new study is released that shows the growing income disparity in the United States. Recently, an Associated Press survey found that 80 percent of adults in the US face near-poverty and unemployment at some point in their lives. Another study by the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University’s School of Law found that 1 in 6 (50 million) Americans face food insecurity, including 17 million children.

Now, the medical journal Pediatrics has published a study measuring the psychological impact on mothers who are unable to afford diapers.

The study, “Diaper Need And Its Impact on Child Health,”  by a group of Yale researchers, found that 30 percent of mothers have struggled to pay for diapers and more than 8 percent of low-income mothers reuse soiled diapers! Not surprisingly, the researchers concluded that the lack of clean diapers “seriously affects maternal stress, child health, and child development.”

So, in the richest nation on Earth, a large percentage of our people can’t tend to the needs of either end of a baby!

We have millions who can’t afford the most basic necessities despite working full-time jobs. We have tens of thousands of homeless – many of them families and veterans. And, instead of passing laws to raise the minimum wage; instead of eliminating tax loopholes that encourage companies to ship manufacturing jobs overseas; instead of passing bills to help create jobs here at home; House Teapublicans plan to cut $40 billion from our food stamp programs over the next 10 years.

It will be difficult since the House has only 9 scheduled work days between now and the end of September, but I’m certain they’ll find a way.

Race Or Economics?

Posted on by

Following the acquittal of George Zimmerman and the ensuing discussion of race by President Obama, conservative race-baiters have gleefully blamed the victims. “It wasn’t Zimmerman’s fault. Trayvon Martin was a young, black thug high on marijuana who had it coming. There’s no race problem. The real problem is the black culture of dependency. Black people are violent…just look at black-on-black violence. Obama is playing the race card to distract people from his failures. Yadda, yadda, yadda…”

Yes, there has been a breakdown of the African-American family unit…just like the breakdown of the white family unit. More and more people are having children out of wedlock, and more married couples are getting divorced.

Still, the race-baiters have a point. According to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 73 percent of African-American babies are born out of wedlock as compared to 29 percent of non-Hispanic white babies. On the surface, those numbers would seem to support racist loudmouths like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. But if you delve deeper, you learn that 66 percent of Native American children and 53 percent of Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, while just 17 percent of Asian children are born outside of a traditional family.

Hmmmm…

That would seem to disprove the right wing talking point that the problem is a lack of Christian values. After all, Hispanics and African-Americans tend to be the most devout Christians of the lot, while Asians tend to represent other faiths, such as Buddhism and Hinduism.

So if the problem isn’t religion, what next?

Right wingers suggest that the issue is IQ. You may remember that Teapublicans recently seized upon a Heritage Foundation “study” that claimed Hispanics have lower IQ than whites. The “study” was the basis of a report that assimilating such low IQ people into the US would cost us trillions. Then some academics examined the “study” and found that its racist conclusions were completely fraudulent. Not only is there NOT a difference in IQ, the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) found that the Senate immigration bill would shrink the nation’s deficit by $897 billion over 20 years.

That leaves only one possible conclusion from the birth data…economics. The cultures with the highest percentage of single-parent households are the cultures that were systematically destroyed by the Euro-American concept of Manifest Destiny; that caucasians were destined to rule; that white people were superior to people of color; that people of color were incapable of taking care of themselves.

Using this despicable philosophy, whites enslaved blacks. Whites committed genocide on Native Americans, leaving them defeated, broken and poor. And whites have routinely discriminated against all other races, denying them the vote, good-paying jobs, safe neighborhoods, and respect. Such conditions have a negative impact on all races. For example, where there are large concentrations of impoverished white people, the percentage of white, unwed mothers dramatically increases, along with violence.

People of color didn’t choose to live in poverty. They didn’t choose to work at meaningless, minimum wage jobs. They didn’t choose to live in slums, poor barrios and on reservations. They didn’t choose to send their children to under-financed schools. They didn’t choose to have greedy gun dealers import weapons into their communities.

They didn’t choose these things anymore than Trayvon Martin chose to take on a gun-toting vigilante with nothing more than a bag of Skittles.

Growth Of The “Moocher” Class.

Posted on by

During the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney was famously caught on camera talking about the 47 percent he claimed pay no taxes. That led to the conservative media referring to the 47 percent as the  “moocher” class; those people whose votes could be bought with promises of free “stuff,” such as food stamps, unemployment insurance and access to healthcare.

According to a new survey exclusive to The Associated Press, Romney had the numbers wrong. The survey shows that 80 percent of adults in the US face near-poverty and unemployment at some point in their lives. You read that correctly…80 percent!

In addition, the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 22 percent of Americans have been significantly affected by the sequester budget cuts. And those who earn less than $30,000 per year have been hardest hit. Moreover, 1 in 6 (50 million) Americans face food insecurity, including 17 million children.

The vast majority of these people work full-time jobs; some work two jobs or more and still can’t make ends meet. Yet conservatives call these people “moochers” and “takers.” Fox News Channel and conservative radio hosts vilify and ridicule the working poor. Instead of placing the blame where it belongs…on greedy corporations and an economy that no longer offers the majority of Americans an opportunity to realize the American Dream…Congressional Teapublicans blame the problem on labor unions, pensions, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They have voted to cut food stamps and unemployment insurance benefits. They have voted 39 times to repeal Obamacare, denying access to healthcare for more than 50 million poor Americans. And, instead of voting to fund projects that would rebuild our infrastructure and create good-paying jobs, they vote to cut taxes for the wealthy.

In the two and a half years since regaining control of the House by promising to focus on jobs, Teapublicans continue to push for budget cuts and to place obstacles in the way of our economic recovery.

As a result of their indifference to the plight of ordinary Americans, our economy continues its slow recovery. We continue to see the loss of good-paying jobs to other countries. We continue to see the loss of pensions and income security for the elderly. And we continue to see a widening gap between the rich and the poor.

Teapublicans are right to talk about the “givers” and “takers” in our society. But they have things backwards. The “givers” are the working people who pay a disproportionate share of their income to taxes, including payroll deductions and sales taxes. And the “takers” are the very wealthy and large corporations who benefit from corporate welfare and record profits.

GOP: 1.6 Million Jobs Don’t Matter.

Posted on by

There was a story this week that was overshadowed by Anthony Weiner’s penis, San Diego Mayor Filner’s hands-on management style and Congressman Steve King’s idiotic statements on immigrants. It was news that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) reported that sequestration cuts forced by the Republican-dominated House will prevent the creation of 1.6 million jobs over the next year.

The report came as an answer to Speaker John Boehner’s oft-asked question, “Where are the jobs under the Obama administration?”

Yet the CBO report was met with a resounding yawn by Republican leadership. They are far more interested in preparing for the next debt ceiling crisis and moving to repeal “Obamacare” a few more dozen times. Indeed, Washington insiders claim that jobs are no longer seen as an issue by Republicans because the economy is growing despite their obstruction.

The economy may be growing, but not nearly fast enough. More important, salaries have not grown at all, except for those at the top.

Nevertheless, the Republican majority continues to ignore jobs in favor of cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Since taking control of the House with the promise of creating jobs, Republicans have not presented a single bill that would create jobs or rebuild our failing infrastructure. They have refused to negotiate a budget deal with Democrats. They won’t even create a committee to resolve differences with the Senate budget bill.

Indeed, this Congress is on track to pass the fewest bills in history!

Think about that for a moment. Our population has grown dramatically. Our nation’s problems are far more complex than ever before. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Our electric grid is cobbled together with antiquated technology. Climate change is claiming shoreline at an alarming rate. (Maryland’s Governor O’Malley recently stated that the state is losing 1.6 acres every day.) A large portion of our population doesn’t know where the next meal is coming from. And a growing number of our military veterans are struggling.

The problems are many. But Republican solutions are few and very far between.

Oh Boy!

Posted on by

Each day, approximately 370,000 babies are born into our world. Some of them will become world-renowned scientists. Some will become democratically-elected leaders. Some will work to end disease and hunger. Some will work to end poverty. Most will simply work to survive.

Of all these babies, only one captured the attention of US and European media. Only one boy, with the incredible good fortune to be born into a life of extreme wealth and privilege, caused young women to swoon; aristocrats to break out their best bottles of bubbly; and ordinary adults to interrupt their own lives in order to await news of the delivery and the baby’s gender.

No single event could better demonstrate the problems we face.

This is not just a matter of ordinary citizens being captivated by celebrity. This baby, his parents and most of his ancestors have done nothing to earn celebrity status. They are not accomplished at music, acting, sports, science, medicine or politics. They have no lengthy list of accomplishments. They are merely expert at collecting and spending money, and living like royalty.

What lies at the heart of their celebrity is the romanticism of every young girl wanting to be a princess; of every adult wanting to know what it’s like to be King or Queen.

This, after all, is the real talent of the privileged: Making you believe that you somehow benefit from their wealth and power. Making you believe that if you continue to support them, they may eventually recognize you. Making you believe that you will eventually share in their good fortune.

Of course, it never happens.

This phenomenon is at the heart of all class warfare. It’s what keeps all of the wealthy and the privileged in power. Corporate CEOs convince shareholders that supporting their enormous salaries will lead to higher share prices. Multinational corporations convince voters that cutting regulations will lower prices and create jobs. Billionaires convince voters that offering them tax breaks will improve the economy.

The reasoning is as phony as the societal value of monarchs (the gem-infused bloodlines, not the butterflies). But naive voters accept it and continue to make the rich richer and themselves poorer.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can level the playing field for all of the babies born into the world. We can vote to improve our own fortunes rather than those of the privileged. It begins by recognizing a “prince” for what he really is…just another baby.